Webpage instead of slides: another way for lecture presentation
Author bio: Dr. Peng Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Health and Environmental Sciences. His research focuses on the ecosystem-atmosphere exchange of atmospheric pollutants. He is the module leader of the environmental statistics modules ENV221 and ENV222, and invited to give lectures in ENV002, ENV117, ENV201, APH003, and the Postgraduate Research Students Training Programme (PGRSTP).
The document you are viewing is a webpage, which I found is an alternative or even better way than slides for online presentation in teaching and learning. In this document, the structure of this document is shown at the top. If you scroll down, you could briefly see interactive tables (e.g. Table 1) and images (e.g. Figure 1 and Figure 2) embedded, and they can be cross referred. An answer could be hidden until the reader click it like this:
Q: Does a presentation document look like this article?
Click to see the answer
A: Mostly. In a presentation document for teaching, only the outlines, bullet items, tables, and figures are shown rather than text heavy.
In this article I will firstly introduce the background as well as the problem I met in my online teaching, then the way how I solved it with the webpage technique, and finally its limitations.
1 Background
Slide presentation (often called PPT in China) is a common way of teaching in high education. A slide document, usually produced with Microsoft Powerpoint, \(\LaTeX\) Beamer, or Keynote, features pages/slides with landscape view, bullet lists, and fancy visual effects. However, PowerPoint was criticized as it degraded the quality and credibility of the communication and wasted people’s time (Jones 2003; Tufte 2003) . A most recent meta-analysis (Baker et al. 2018) revealed that students’ learning based on PowerPoint is not improved when compared with traditional instruction.
2 Problems
Based on the feedback in the module questionnaires (MQs) and conversations with my students, I found that off-campus students are often confused with the logical structure of a single lecture or the entire module, mainly because a slide presentation often breaks a logical thread/web into pieces and patches. For on-campus students, the teacher could explain the logical structure via face-to-face talks and live Q&A sessions, but the off-campus students often miss the live sessions due to jet lags or poor internet communications. Their learning depends more on watching recorded lectures, reading the slide documents, and communicating via emails.
It is hard to present the connections between slides. With slides, the teacher always has to think about where to place the page breaker for separating slides, which is actually unnecessary. Online learners usually go over the slides after class, and the slides document often mislead them into a straight line, while the knowledge itself is often nested or web-structured. One user of Zhihu (the most well-known Q&A forum in the Chinese community) complained that “some modules are too dependent on PPT” at XJTLU1, while another stated that some teachers at XJTLU were awesome as they did not use PPT but chalk and blackboard2.
3 Solution
Instead of slides, the teaching materials were organized in webpages (html). The advantages of webpages is as follows:
A nested or web-structure lecture or module can be better presented in a webpage with section numbering, different levels of headings, cross-references, etc.. This article is a simple example. We could easily link any part to another so that the online learners could understand them better. When they ask questions about a section or a figure via email, they could mention it (e.g. see Section 1 or Figure 1) easily for communicating with the teachers.
Webpages are easy to maintain as long as they are hosted on a server such as GitHub Pages. If there is something missing in the teaching materials, I only have to update the webpages, and the hyperlink does not change. The off-campus students don’t have to download the teaching materials again. This can ensure that they always see the newest teaching materials. An offline version is also available for students to download and use anywhere they would like.
Webpages are more powerful than commonly used slides. I could embed multimedia sources such as video clips, sounds, interactive tables (e.g. Table 1) and images (e.g. Figure 1 & Figure 2), and hidden parts into the webpage, which easily attract the online students’ learning interests and attention.
Teaching materials organized in webpages have the potential to be developed into a textbook for publishing. The two books I published (Learning R and Modern Statistical Graphs) both came from webpage-organized materials.
Students from both modules ENV221 (previously ENV203) and ENV222 were surprised and happy with this new format. An ENV221 student commented, “I really appreciate the materials design page. The website designed is quite clear and accessible.”
4 Limitations
The experience of webpage presentation document comes from the statistics modules I lead. Although I believe it could be used widely, it might not suit some modules.
The technique for creating webpages is not well-known, although it is not difficult. R language users or Python users could easily learn this technique with the R Markdown packages or the Jupyter Notebook platform, while other users might need a couple of hours for learning it.
5 Conclusion
As an alternative way of lecture presentation, webpage document plays a better role for helping online learners in understanding and organizing the knowledge delivered in a module. Although it requires some techniques, it has the potential to be applied to other modules so as to improve the teaching quality. Moreover, it benefits the onsite learners as well.
Appendix
References
Baker, James P, Alan K Goodboy, Nicholas D Bowman, and Alyssa A Wright. 2018. “Does Teaching with PowerPoint Increase Students’ Learning? A Meta-Analysis.” Computers & Education 126: 376–87.
Jones, Allan M. 2003. “The Use and Abuse of PowerPoint in Teaching and Learning in the Life Sciences: A Personal Overview.” Bioscience Education 2 (1): 1–13.
Tufte, Edward R. 2003. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Graphics Press Cheshire, CT.